Modernization as Spectacle in Africa ed. by Peter J. Bloom, Stephan F. Miescher and Takyiwaa Manuh (review)

This is a varied collection of fifteen sole-authored chapters on modernization as spectacle, an area that has attracted little research to date. The first of the book’s five sections, ‘Modernization and the origins of the package’, explores the epistemology of African ‘modernization’ theoretically by exploring the writings of earlier African development planners, including Apter, Lewis, Rostow and Wallerstein. Apter’s viewpoint is revisited by his son, whose access to his father’s memoirs gives a particularly revealing analysis. Hintzen’s chapter offers a contemporary analysis of African development, engaging with figures who have defined Africa’s place in contemporary development narratives. This part of the collection is very enlightening – theory heavy but well-referenced.

‘Media, modernity, and modernization’ is the most developed section, but is poorly linked to the others. Its focus is on the broadcasting efforts of the colonial and early postcolonial producers and ‘propaganda-ists’ of West Africa, with contributions from Southern and East Africa. Disappointingly, several chapters repeat the same analyses of the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment (BEKE) project and British Colonial Film Unit.

‘Infrastructure and effects’ produces contrasting analyses of dams and mining projects. However, the diverse focus of the contributing authors means that the chapters read more as a collection of interesting pieces on a general theme. Tischler’s and Miescher’s essays on the Kariba and Akosombo dams respectively would have benefited from using a similar comparative analytical lens, and using this to examine different modernization narratives of other projects taking place at a similar time. Hecht’s essay on Gabonese uranium mining, however, stands out in both its subject matter and its detailed analysis of an aspect of mining rarely covered in research from an ‘off-the-radar’ country, presenting a welcome analysis of a hitherto unknown project and its local long-term effects.

‘Institutional training in Nkrumah’s Ghana’ focuses on a number of Ghana-specific incidents in the ‘modernization’ narrative. The foundation of the Ghana Institute of African Studies and the life and activities of Accra Gliding Club’s founder are both self-referential narratives about Ghanaian institutions that could have benefited from contextual comparison with other British West African institutions, such as the African Studies Centres inaugurated in Nigeria within the same period, and even CODESRIA’s later formation. Similarly, the Gliding Club’s ‘white elephant’ history could have had more contextual and situational significance had it been contrasted with the ‘ballon’ house project on the book’s cover.

In ‘The African personality dances highlife’, Plageman focuses on the Ghanaian music industry’s push towards an ‘indigenization’ of music and display that was not dissimilar to ‘Africanization’ movements in Nigeria, the Congo and elsewhere at the same time. What was the general experience of this ideological ‘turn’ in the West African region in particular, and what legacy is left to us today? Arguably, Fela’s Nigeria-originated Afrobeat ‘movement’ had its roots in its radical response to this first wave of state-mediated musical media reform.

‘Modernization and the literary imagination’, the final section of the book, had the most potential. Mbowa’s and Wilson-Tagoe’s textual-historical analyses of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and contemporary African literature are informative but do not challenge existing texts. McMahon’s ‘Theater and the politics of display’, however, offers a brilliant analysis of a play little known outside francophone Africa, and an insight into the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal. Unfortunately, McMahon does not compare Senegal 1966 with the later Nigerian FESTAC 77, as arguably the spectacle of the latter was a hyper-attenuation of the earlier event in Senegal.

Most disappointing is the lack of an editorial conclusion to the volume, which might have attempted to draw out the connected narratives and also the volume’s gaps and lapses...